Technological: laptops+wifi+two screens Social: lectures, classroom discussions, backchannels, online discourse Organizational/political: One-to-many grading
As far as I have been able to determine, nobody ever decreed that it is pedagogically beneficial to install wi-fi and allow students to IM, chat, Google, email, or slay orcs during a lecture. It’s a perfect example of a technological innovation that is colliding with social and institutional structures. I did, however, once look over the shoulder of an undergraduate at a symposium at Yale. At first, I was saddened that he was playing word games and checking the course catalog during a fascinating panel that he might have benefitted from hearing. Then, the longer I snooped, the more I noticed that he was googling for terms the speakers on the panel were using and updating an outline of their discussion while he was playing word games and checking the course catalog. I doubt that anybody TAUGHT him to multitask productively in class, which led me to wonder whether it’s a skill that can be learned, and therefore taught. I’m personally interested in experimenting with the technology we have in this room, and in doing it in a systematic manner. As an experiment, I’d like to eliminate extraneous variables. But I know that the social element is crucial -- if I’m so tight-assed that I lose your interest, the experiment could fail.
For this class, I ask you to put the lids down on your laptops. We’re starting out with a one to many media regime. During our next class meeting on Thursday, I will ask you to use one of the iBooks provided in this room, or your own computer, to write IM messages to the screen. We’ll see where it goes from there. Next week, those students who intend to continue this course will start blogging.
There are two billion mobile telephones in the world. The next two billion mobile telephones will also be cameras. Within ten years, broadcast-quality video cameras will be in the hands of most of the world’s population. Phonecams that send images to the Internet today are only one of the technologies that are changing the way journalism is practiced. The story of digital journalism is still in its opening acts. We don’t know yet whether it will be a history changer or a fad. What we do know is that phonecams, blogs, wikis, virtual communities, smart mobs, and podcasts have arrived as potential change factors at a time when journalism and democracy are challenged, if not in outright crisis. This photograph is from the Wikipedia page on the 2005 Tsunami. Is it authentic? I don’t know.
James Madison, who founded the American Whig Society as a college student and was the principal author of the U.S. Constitution at the age of 36, emphasized the connection between a free press and the democratic experiment, in a letter to W.T. Barry in 1822, words that remain carved in marble at the Library of Congress today: "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Digital technologies are changing the kind of “popular information” that can be transmitted, the amount of information that can be transmitted, and, most importantly, WHO has the power to transmit information. The first change that technology brought to journalism, however, was a radical change in the speed of transmission. After millennia of runners, horses, and sailing ships, the vehicles of knowledge transfer began to go digital more than a century ago.
Changes in technology and social practices are eroding, fragmenting, and corrupting the role of journalism as it emerged in the centuries since Gutenberg. And other changes are making possible new literacies, new publics, and perhaps new forms of governance. Today’s journalism students are heading directly into the teeth of this storm of change.
Changes in the technical capability to transmit information have dramatically transformed the speed with which news can be conveyed, and the scope of its reach. The changes really began to accelerate in the 19th century, when the world-spanning telegraph cables created the Victorian Internet, the ancestral form of today’s Net. While it had taken over three months for people in England to get the word by sailing ship that Lincoln had been assassinated, less than twenty years later, people around the world learned within hours that Krakatoa had erupted, via messages tapped out in Morse code and carried through intercontinental cables.
Today, news is at hand instantaneously, at all times, in most places, for most people. In full sound and video.
And the all-important issue of WHO has the power to broadcast information has undergone a profound transformation. The structure of information flow is no longer exclusively few to many, but many to many. Every net-connected PC and mobile device in the world is a global printing press, broadcasting station, market, community, playing field, and meeting place.
News items can be as much constructed as captured. The power to choose the point of view has always been as invisible as it is effective. But now the power to submit any point of view to scrutiny has been radically expanded. Another photographer got a view of the same event from a perspective that most of the world didn’t see -- except on the Internet.
Then bloggers swarmed on it and noted that one of the “Free Iraqi Forces” militia greeting Marines in Southern Iraq, also greeted them in Baghdad, moments before the Saddam statue fell, a few days later, and linked it with Bush administration former ally, Ahmed Chalabi. (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm)
SenatorTrent Lott, CBS’s Dan Rather, CNN’s Eason Jordan
Three powerful players in politics and journalism lost power because mobs of bloggers from the left and right “fact-checked their asses” and forced traditional broadcast agenda to pay attention.
Jayson Blair of the New York Times and Stephen Glass of the New Republic - ‘fabulists’ who were caught plagiarizing and inventing stories out of whole cloth
Judith Miller of the New York Times, a journalist deeply embedded in the web of politics, who recently apologized for being wrong about the White House’s justification for war, but defended printing the stories anyway. She was then implicated in the scandal over the White House leaking the identity of a CIA agent whose husband had questioned the same stories.
The ubiquity of camera phones and an Internet audience willing to spread the gossip usher in a new era of social justice, also for better or worse .
Many to many media speed the worldwide dissemination of information, misinformation, and disinformation. Fake news can be spread easily, as in the story of Pat Robertson saying God had brought Katrina upon New Orleans. This was a satirical piece produced by Dateline Hollywood, but perceived by many as truth.
(The premise is not too far from things Robertson has said. From Snopes.com: During a 6 August 1998 broadcast of The 700 Club, Mr. Robertson addressed comments at participants of the Orlando, Florida, Gay Pride Festival, stating: "I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you.”)
Is there a balance between the blogosphere/citizen journalism and the broadcast media? Has the power to persuade and influence all but a subculture of Internet enthusiasts been purchased by a small number of disinfotainment providers? Or will packs of hyena bloggers on the left and right continue to attack public figures -- especially when their statements can be fact-checked?
At the same time that Rupert Murdoch is acquiring MySpace, experiments in citizen journalism are blossoming around the world. Some shining examples of user-generated news sites, user-filtered news sites and news accumulators. But the future of citizen journalism is far from clear. What will it take for bottom-up news media to succeed? What might be lost as well as gained if they do?
What was journalism? What was "the public?" What are digital media? What are its publics?
Because this course is about understanding a change that is occurring in the practice of journalism, we will begin by looking at journalism before it changed. What was journalism before the videocamphone and the Web? What was "the public?" How did digital media enter journalism? What are its publics?
(A room full of white men in white shirts and big stacks of paper -- spikes, gluepots, typewriters, copy boys, and a poker game in the back room)
When old journalism met new media:
Billions of dollars were wasted in “teletext” experiments in the 1970s, which used telephones as a kind of remote control device for canned information services delivered via television. Television was going to become interactive! Print and television media companies anticipated the challenge of digital media decades before the Internet, but their visions of a digital future were disastrously skewed by their assumption that people would be more interested in professionally packaged content than personal expression and interpersonal communication. Eventually, traditional broadcast media migrated to the Web. At first, like all new media, it aped the structure of analog, few-to-many media. Eventually, online news began to morph to fill the dramatically larger possibility space presented by digital media.
Writing for digital media
We’re well into the era of media that can make you a star from your dorm room in some parts of the world, can help bring down powerful politicians in other parts of the world, and can get you tortured in some places. Story and voice mean more than one thing, now. We’re going to get our hands on. Every student who sticks through this course will know, from the inside, how it feels to blog to the world and to participate in building wikipedia.
Organization, Technology and Multi-Mediated Storytelling
Digital technology enables not only radically expanded distribution capabilities, but changes the structure of news presentation and the structure of news seeking. Google alerts, del.icio.us tags, and RSS feeds turn consumer devices into infinitely consumer-configurable control panels for news.
News programming is becoming unbundled. Action News is challenged by vlogs. Speedy Networks, New Gatekeepers
The agenda-setting power of the press is instantiated in the editorial process, incarnated in the person of the traditional crusty editors who decided what news to assign, which stories to pursue, what headlines to lead. Now, journalists’ stories might be produced for the Times or CNN, but to the bloggers and search engines, the address of the story is not as importance as its relevance to individuals. The news audience is becoming unbundled, as well, and new intermediary mechanisms are beginning to evolve, from Technorati to Google News to Tivo.
Show Me the Money: Networked Technology and Financial Concentration
MySpace is recent, huge, is populated almost entirely by teens, gets more traffic than Google, has instantaneously become an influential cultural medium for musicians and their fans…and it’s now owned by Rupert Murdoch.
If WHO has the power to communicate is a key question, what does it mean to own the channels through which people communicate?
The Emergence of Collaborative Citizen Journalism
The first images of the London tube bombing of July 7, 2005 were sent to flickr -- and were picked up by the BBC and New York Times. OhMyNews, NewsTrust, Wikinews, Digg -- the first generations of collective journalism are only now beginning to emerge. What are the promises, perils, and points of leverage?
“Personal” journalism: Pundits, Freelancers and Public Intellectuals
The “news” was born in the coffeehouses of 18th century England and France, when the innkeepers began writing down what the maritime underwriters at Lloyds or the stock brokers at the Royal Exchange had to say. There’s news about events, and since the age of pamphleteers, there’s news about what certain individuals think. With the emergence of the blogosphere, pundits, freelancers, and public intellectuals have taken to blogging in a way that Tom Paine, whose “Common Sense” sold 600,000 copies out of a population of three million in 1776, would have heartily approved.
The digitization of journalism is the latest turn in a coevolutionary spiral that goes back at least as far as mesopotamia: The alphabet emerged from the record keepers for the first emperors who built cities of mud bricks.
The cuneiform ancestors of the alphabet appeared in the form of marks on clay as a means of accounting for commodities such as wine, wheat, or sheep — and the taxing of that wealth by the empire. The master practitioners of this new medium were the accountants for the emperors and their priest-administrators.
An elite of priests and civil administrators were taught the secret of encoding and decoding knowledge and transmitting it across time and space.
Then, within decades of its invention, the printing press enabled populations of millions to amplify their thinking by becoming literate.
Again, new forms of collective action emerged from newly literate populations – Protestant reformations, constitutional democracies Scientific revolutions.
Rethinking "The Public": The Origins and Nature of the Public Sphere
Journalism differs from other forms of cultural production in one significant sense: what we know as liberty, democracy, and citizenship depends on the relationship between citizens, journalists, and governance.
Certain tools aren’t just useful widgets. They are useful widgets for the mind -- and for connecting minds. The alphabet was a useful widget for the imperial elites, until the printing press made literate populations possible. The revolutions and constitutions of 1776 and 1789 were eruptions of collective action that depended on pamphlets like “A Declaration of The Rights of Man” or “Common Sense,” and a large enough number of people to read them. When the founders of the USA attempted to create a new means of self-governance, they used “Committees of Correspondence” and argued about the structure of their new governance in newspaper editorials that came to be known as “The Federalist Papers.” The power to create and maintain the mechanisms of governance was the action of a public. The origins, nature, and future of the public sphere have everything to do with how the role of journalists is changing in the age of digital publishing. That’s why we’re going to take a full week on the public sphere -- one class about its origins, and another about its future.
The Public Sphere in The Internet Era
When the citizen-reporters for Korea’s OhMyNews called for street demonstrations to protest the attempt to impeach South Korea’s President, tens of thousands of people hit the streets. Do blogs, wikis, flamewars, BBSs and other online advocacy, organizing, and argument media constitute the contemporary version of the public sphere? Do the “publics” who assemble and argue online meet Habermas’ criteria for critical-rational debate?
New Communities, New Routines: Early Alternatives
During the Battle for Seattle, where protesters succeeded in disrupting the World Trade Organization, using swarming tactics and mobile communications, the first independent media center was set up -- an ad-hoc, grassroots, but highly organized nerve-center for electronic opposition journalism.
New Communities, News Communities
For decades, online protocultures evolved the norms of social cyberspace. We didn’t know it was cyberculture when we started having parties at the WELL offices in 1985.
In 1995, the Web emerged, and so did “the social Web.” By 2005, chats, BBSs, listservs, groupblogs, wikis are part of the daily lives of millions. Both the nature of “publics” and the role of journalists are affected by the addition of cyberspace communications to the human social repertoire. The “network forum,” a term used by Fred Turner to describe the origins of cyberculture in the Whole Earth Catalog counterculture, will be our lens to bring virtual communities into sharper focus as they relate to the role of journalism.
Social Software and We Media (delicious popular tags as of Nov 2005)
Knowledge has always been a social enterprise, and media like blogs, social bookmarking sites, tagging and RSS have added a social dimension to the gathering, disseminating, categorization, contextualization of knowledge. Del.icio.us, Bloglines, Flickr are the prototypical forms of new genres that are sure to evolve rapidly in the next few years. How are these tools being applied to journalism -- and how are they changing the way news is gathered and viewed? Will Time-Warner. ClearChannel or Newscorp be the owners of tomorrow’s knowledge commons -- or will it be Yahoo or Google?
Reputation Economies and Information Networks
How are the dynamics of open source production processes affecting the ways journalists serve the public? For better and worse, how might social accounting technologies like eBay's or Slashdot's or RateMyProfessor.com’s reputation systems shape the gathering, evaluation, dissemination, and analysis of news?
Code as Law, Architecture as Politics
How are social processes being written into and performed by computer code? In what ways is the architecture of communication media a political matter? What are the implications of these phenomena for journalists?
Howard Rheingold’s lecture notes: Comm 117/217 “Digital Journalism” January 10, 2006